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The sweet smell of ripe cantaloupes wafted through a slight morning breeze Thursday at Golden Spread Farmers Market as a gaggle of customers picked over piles of fresh produce.

The market, located at Southwest 15th Avenue and Pecos Street near Sunset Center, was bustling with morning buyers and busy vendors.

Bob Moore, an Amarillo lawyer, rolled in on his way to work and soon was on his way with a small sack of peaches and pepper jam in tow.

“Actually, I’m going to take some back to my office and share with some people and take some home,” he said.

“The produce is so good. ... This morning, I got up bright and early and came over here,” Moore said.

A few stands over, Daniel Stout of Dumas was bagging up corn from a Wieck Farms trailer packed shoulder-high with sacks. Customers soon began lining up.

Mildred Wieck of Wieck Farms in Etter said she has been involved with the farmers market since it was launched more than two decades ago.

The farm’s fresh ears of milky white corn, she said, are picked by machine, sorted by hand and hauled to Amarillo.

“We harvest every day, sometimes twice a day,” she said.

“It makes long days. We start at 4 in the morning and go until 8:30 or 9 at night.”

Black-eyed peas, she said, should be on their way in a couple of weeks after hail hammered the first crop of the year.

For Austin Kimbrell, 23, farming has been a lifelong venture.

She and father Ronnie Kimbrell own Cimarron Organics in Amarillo, and organic farming has been in her blood since she was about 12.

Her stand offered a slew of organic vegetables, ranging from onions to yellow squash, potatoes, tomatoes, two varieties of onions and melons.

“Everything was harvested yesterday except the onions because onions hold over. Onions and potatoes, you dig them up all at once and you store them in the cooling shed,” Kimbrell said as she prepared to wait on a customer.

Getting certified as an organic farm requires a great deal of time and money, she said.

Organic farming also requires using beneficial insects and natural sprays to combat insects such as squash bugs that she said could threaten an entire crop.

“A lot of work goes into it, but it’s so much better for you. ... It’s something that’s safe for your body,” she said of organic produce. “I love being able to bring this to the people, organic produce that they know who grew it.”